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Saturday, December 27, 2014

#1246: Frances Cress Welsing

Frances Cress Welsing is a D.C. psychiatrist and completely
batshit insane. She is particularly noted for her afrocentric “Cress
Theory of Color Confrontation,” and The
Isis Papers; The Keys to the Colors (1991). Welsing claims that there is a
system practiced (consciously and unconsciously) by the global white minority to
ensure their genetic survival by any means necessary, a system that attacks
people of color (particularly of African descent) in all areas of activity, and
that it is, accordingly, imperative that people of color (particularly of
African descent) understand how the system of white supremacy works in order to
dismantle it. So far, so good, perhaps – some over-the-top formulations, but
that can probably be excused when dealing with a real issue.

But no. In The Isis
Papers she formulates her pseudoscientific melanin theory,
the gist of which is that white people are the genetically defective descendants of albino
mutants, a mutation that may have caused them (justifiably, it seems) to have been
forcibly expelled from Africa. And it is because “pure whitness” is so easily
genetically lost during interracial breeding that light-skinned peoples have developed
an aggressive colonial urge. She also ascribes plenty inherent and behavioral
differences between black and white people to this “melanin deficiency,” since
melanin is apparently a superconductor that absorbs all frequencies of the
electromagnetic spectrum, can convert sound energy to light energy, and work as
a minicomputer to process information; a deficiency would accordingly be bad).
Her evidence is apparently restricted to “her experiences as a psychiatrist”.

White people’s (accurate) sense of their own inferiority is
exhibited in various cultural practices: “On both St. Valentine’s Day and
Mother’s Day, the white male gives gifts of chocolate candy with nut … If his
sweetheart ingests ‘chocolate with nuts’, the white male can fantasize that he
is genetically equal to the Black male … Is it not also curious that when white
males are young and vigorous, they attempt to master the large brown balls, but
as they become older and wiser, they psychologically resign themselves to their
inability to master the large brown balls? Their focus then shifts
masochistically to hitting the tiny white golf balls in disgust and resignation
– in full final realization of white genetic recessiveness.” I suppose such
gibberish is standard fare in some branches of post-modern Freudianism – big
claims are justified by vague associations between words in any manner the
practitioner may fancy – but it is no less loony for that.

According to Welsing psychiatry (that is, her brand of psychiatry) seems to be
some sort of primary science. Her “Unified Field Theory Psychiatry” encompasses
and grounds biology, psychology, and physics, and is a prerequisite to
understanding the etiology of a unified field of energy phenomena, in
particular the “behavior-energy” underlying racial conflict (yes, it is quantum woo),
as well as homosexuality and sexism. And no, she doesn’t like gays. According
to Welsing black male homosexuality was imposed on blacks by the white man in
order to reduce the black population; it is a sign of weakness, and homosexual
patterns of behavior are simply expressions of black male self-submission to
other males in the area of sex, as well as in economics, education,
entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, and war.

But this, readers, is just the beginning of Welsing’s
“scientifically based” theories of race. According to Welsing there is a
correlation between high blood pressure and blackness of skin due to the fact
that melanin picks up energy vibrations from other people under stress – the darker the skin, the more melanin, and
thus the more vibrations would supposedly be picked up. This apparently
explains why George Washington Carver was so successful in discovering useful
products from plants – he owed his success not to his MA in chemistry, but to
the fact that he was dark-skinned: The plants “talked to his
melanin and told him what they were good for” during his early morning strolls.
It is hard to see how such ideas, if incorporated in a school curriculum (which
is what Welsing and her group try to achieve – just like creationists, the
point is to get the rubbish into schools, not to gather evidence), would have
any long-term positive effects for the target groups.

But melanin can do more than talking to plants. According to
Welsing (and repeated in particular by Hunter Adams) the Dogon of Mali
discovered a dwarf companion of Sirius,
Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye. They did so, according to
Welsing, because the Dogon’s melanin, in addition to giving you ESP, functions
in a manner similar to an infrared telescope,
enabling them to detect Sirius B through the melanin in their pineal glands
(yes, the pineal gland).
Evidence, or plausible mechanism? Forget it – her justification is a matter of
Freudian associations.
She further claims that everything that happens on Earth is converted to energy
and beamed up to Sirius B, and that the high melanin content of black people
enables them to tap into that information. Thus, for instance, Greek oracles
(who were apparently black, according to Welsing) were able to foresee the
future, just as present-day blacks are able to do (but of course not
melanin-deficient whites).

Diagnosis: Appalling pseudoscientific bullshit. And as with
other pseudoscientce, it is all about outreach, not finding out what’s actually
the case.